There are some other items that I noticed which have some appeal. The new Wintergrasp Titan equipment looks quite good. I may pick up a few pieces. They aren't in wowhead's DB yet, otherwise I'd link to them. They were on par with the Furious PvP gear, and not too many Wintergrasp marks.

I won't talk much about my Shammy alt here, but I do want to say that the new totem mechanism is really nice. It's a pain to hit a totem drop button four times. Now it's just once for up to three presets.

My guild raids on Tuesdays for good or evil. Patch days are often evil. This was no exception. We had all sorts of issues just in Ulduar. We started about an hour late with people trying to get things working.

FL took three tries with just one tower up. DCs were pretty nuts. Halfway through the kill, my Demolisher lost its ability for me to use the 1 and 2 keys. They'd insta-cycle and not actually fire anything. Needless to say, it was a little difficult to roll pyrite. In normal FL takedowns, I'd heartilly recommend not having a demolisher try to ram FL. It was all I had and somehow we didn't die.

Then the server crashed for 30 minutes or so. It was a long death spiral of a death.

Then we hit XT-002. And boy was it a surprise. First the good news. It appeared to me that I was getting more Lock and Loads per minute than ever before. With trash, I could of course cause it to proc. That was kinda nice to use BA and be able to slow and snake trap. But that's not what I was noticing. When I was doing a normal survival rotation on XT, I was seeing LnL procs just from BA. A fair number. We'll need to see more, but I'm optimistic there may have been something fixed. In 3.1, it seemed to proc once or twice a 10min fight. Which of course is terrible. Previous to 3.1, I could get it to proc every 30 seconds by trap-dancing. ("Wow! Remember trap-dancing!") Now it seemed like it was about once every minute or so -- outside of traps proc'ng it.

Of course all the XT fun was short-lived. As soon as the adds came out mid-heart phase we got our surprises. First, you can't put him against a side wall anymore. They'll come from all four corners now. Second, it's hugely bugged. There are 12-18 bomb bots per wave. Each wave comes out all at the same time from each location (not staggered), and there are 40-80 of the things. I recall seeing maybe one bomb-bot per pack before. In the current state, it appears to be 6 per scrap-pack.

We were up to the challenge, but it got a little ridiculous with additional DCs so we called it.

I did a few dailies, fixed some add-ons, and hit the new BG.

The new battleground is similar to Alterac Valley, in that many people don't have a clue what to do. (Myself included!) That said, I planted bombs on their base, killed some tanks, killed a lot of people, and we won. I got a couple achievments out of it, which aren't listed on wowarmory or wowhead yet. I think I really like it.

Then a late night group got together for a 10man attempt in the Coliseum. It was interesting although difficult. Some of it was thanks to DCs. Some of it is just quite difficult. Between bosses, there is no downtime to chug water. With the mana regen and replenishment nerfs, the healers have no chance to get their mana back betwen the big guys. There is a fair 15 second window when it should be possible, but it isn't out of combat. Other than this it seems reasonable.